Labour to hold ‘Jeremy Corbyn festival’

The Labour Party is planning a summer music festival to celebrate leader Jeremy Corbyn, it has emerged.

Mr Corbyn addressed tens of thousands of muddy festivalgoers from the pyramid stage of at Glastonbury last summer, to chants of ‘Oh! Jeremy Corbyn!’.

Glastonbury is having a year off to protect the site, so Labour bosses have decided to set up a festival of their own.

The event – called Labour Live – will be held in North London and is expected to attract stars who have publicly supported the Labour leader, though it is expected that some new names will be added to the setlist.

In the 2017 election campaign acts such as Clean Bandit, Steve Coogan, Maxine Peak and Wolf Alice appeared at Corbyn rallies.

This isn’t the first time political parties have tried to engage youth support through festivals.

Last year the Conservative MP, George Freeman, set up a Conservative ‘Ideas Festival’.

An invite-only event, it was billed as a cross between book festival Hay-on-Wye and rock festival Latitude and saw 200 people trekking to the farm in Berkshire to develop their centre-right political thoughts.

The ‘Big Tent Ideas Festival’ is coming back this summer, and we’re told it is going to be “much bigger and much more public”.

Organisers say we can expect to hear from centre-right political thinkers alongside more arts, music and poetry – the date and full rundown will be announced in March.

And let’s not forget that back in the mid-1980s, a group of musicians including Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Kirsty MacColl set up Red Wedge to support the Labour Party and organised a number of major tours.

Artists like Bananarama, Elvis Costello, Sade and The Smiths were involved and a comedy circuit was later set up with comedians such as Lenny Henry, Harry Enfield and Robbie Coltrane. But when the Tories won a third consecutive victory in 1987 the grouping fell away.

A Labour spokesperson said: “We are exploring options for ways to continue to open up politics to a wider audience and spread Labour’s message about how we can build a society that works for the many, not the few.”